I heard the first perfor­mance of Talking About Dancing at Stony Brook yester­day. To get there, I had to take a boat, which I don’t do nearly enough. It really feels like an accom­plish­ment, making a boat journey. I also like the feeling of ferry-boats, which all seem to orig­i­nate from the same era (maybe the 60’s?) after which they appar­ently stopped making them. I’ve never seen a new ferry. The Martha’s Vineyard Islander was my favorite when I was six, and she appar­ently just retired last year!

he SUNY campuses also seem to have been built around the same time as all ferries, at the height of the kind of imper­sonal modernism that every­body now hates. The build­ings are brown-brick mono­liths with huge, feature­less spaces between them. The inte­ri­ors of the build­ings are iden­ti­cal corri­dors of white cinderblock. I’m sure that if I went to school there, I would get lost most days, espe­cially since there are no windows with which to orient oneself.

Flying Forms put on an incred­i­bly ambi­tious concert of seven world premières. I think this means that the modern reper­toire for Baroque trio just increased by about 30 percent. My friends Robin and Zach both wrote really enjoy­able pieces, Robin’s a pretty literal inter­pre­ta­tion of ancient Scottish folk-song practice, and Zach’s a spicy neoclas­si­cal tribute to the Greek muses. Even though many of the pieces referred to the past for inspi­ra­tion (mine included) I was impressed with the variety of styles and instru­men­tal idioms that people came up with. The trio played tire­lessly, in fact even seemed to gain energy towards the end of the concert, when they were joined by an awesome soprano named Elis­a­beth Holmertz.

Last Thursday was another New Music New Haven, one of the strangest I’ve been to: two and a half hours of weird styl­is­tic juxta­po­si­tions. Tom Duffy dressed up in a half-black-half-white tuxedo, with makeup and hair… paint (there was music that went along with that, too). Derrick had an improv… techno? piece? And don’t forget Alvin Lucier’sSilver Street­car for Orches­tra, a 15-minute triangle solo spec­tac­u­larly played by Mike Compitello. Then Jay had a moody, atmos­pheric piece for trombone and sampled trombone. In between those were some more normal pieces, which I think only seemed normal compared to their surround­ings (my piece, Play it by Ear, again included).

I had a strange expe­ri­ence the morning of the concert. I woke up not hearing well in my right ear; it felt sealed off somehow. The health service discov­ered that in fact both my ear canals were almost completely blocked. I’d been hearing every­thing through two pinholes for who knows how long. So they shot some water all up ins and that seemed to do the trick. I spent the day being entranced by what I had thought were familiar sounds; a running faucet, rustling bedclothes, typing on my computer, and so forth. All those high frequen­cies I’d been missing! I could even hear the beats in Fide­liotrio (just in time)! I can’t imagine a better state of mind (and body) in which to listen to Lucier’s music (OK, perhaps I can), most of which is based on the unhur­ried explo­ration of natural sonic phenom­ena. I really enjoyed Silver Street­car. Trian­gles have some truly amazing over­tones.